Ledoux had been trying to make away, but Bibi held him by the arm.
“Hold on, what’s happening? Is the house alight?”
Ledoux was frightened.
“Look out! The whole village is here, and the women are spiteful.”
“He’s dead, that chap, isn’t he? Whose hand is that? Hallo!”
“Mine!” said Philipon. “You stand where you are, Louis Blanc. And you, too, you dog with the red eyes. Here, look after these two beauties, some of you.”
And suddenly, yet with deliberation, he took Bibi by the beard and held him as a man might hold a goat.
“Yes, you, Louis Blanc, it is not for me to spit in the face of a blind man. Stand still, will you? If there is law in Beaucourt to-day it is the law of my hammer.”
Louis Blanc stood still. He had always been afraid of Philipon, the one man in Beaucourt who was stronger than himself.
Meanwhile, the unconscious figure of Paul Brent and the two kneeling women bending over it held the crowd silent and attentive. Here was a little human scene that had all the helplessness and the inevitableness of tragedy, a man lying dead in a village street, and a woman holding his poor head in her lap. That is how the crowd saw it. They looked at Manon with a shrinking curiosity, a sympathy that was kindly inarticulate. With her hands she was wiping away the dust from Paul’s hair, her eyes quite tearless, eyes that seemed to look at a sudden emptiness, a vacancy in life. Paul was not dead, but she believed that he was dying.